Team Coaching

Team coaching is a cost effective approach to addressing leadership development. Individual executive coaching as a tailored approach to professional development that focuses on results and outcomes has become well established. However, individuals do not perform in a vacuum. Individual performance is usually influenced by the relationships that surround it, and this has been long recognised by organisations investing in team building activities and ‘away days’.

Team coaching is a synthesis of executive coaching and team development. It is a process in which the whole team works with a coach to develop greater awareness of themselves & their effectiveness as a team, in their organisational context, in order to more effectively serve their stakeholders. It supports sustainable change, and can be particularly useful in times of turbulence in the external environment and/or the organisation, in breaking down silo working and building cross divisional relationships or when the team are facing new challenges and have to quickly develop new ways of responding to them.

Approaches to team development have tended to focus on building the team as an entity – ‘how we can work well / better together’ – in terms of shared purpose, greater understanding of each others’ individual strengths and contributions, and stronger relationships. The role of the facilitator / coach is to design and facilitate a process that will enable the team to review its effectiveness, build agreements or resolve conflicts, or in some cases to act as ‘critical friend’ helping the team explore how to operate more effectively when they are together.

A team coaching approach builds on this to focus on the whole team’s effectiveness in its organisational context, when team members are together and when they are apart.

High performing teams aim to develop their collective capacity to go and spend the rest of the week leading all aspects of the business in a congruent and joined up way that provides operational integration and transformational change aligned to the vision, mission, strategy and core values of the organisation. (Peter Hawkins 2011)

A team coaching programme can include a wide range of activities:

Individual and team diagnostic questionnaires and psychometrics, drawing on a suite of type mapping tools

Team building activities

Facilitated time away from the day to day pressures to reflect, review, plan and make decisions on key issues

Development of team agreements on key success factors and ways of operating, and review and evaluation of team performance and behaviour against them

Collection and consideration of stakeholder feedback

‘Real time’ process observation and coaching of the team working together

Individual coaching on goals agreed with the team in the service of wider team effectiveness.